Future Fresser: Explained

A while back, a commenter on one of my posts asked, “Someone, please tell me what on Earth ‘Future Fresser’ means?” This is my last column, as I’ve decamped to New York for the next few months, so I figured I’d finally explain it. I’ve always had a bit of the yiddishkeit, and fresser entered my vocabulary as the title of a monstrous sandwich at the Stage Deli in Manhattan, purportedly to honor Woody Allen’s gluttony.

I figured that my hope that new communication tools can in some way provide a better, or at least, more interesting future combined with the somewhat unhealthy amount of time I spend online could be summed up as a glutton for technology and optimism. Hence, Future Fresser. Now it turns out my interview with the SF Weekly’s former online editor Matt Stroud is now the third result on Google for ‘fresser’ — hopefully this post will take me to the top of the list.

The point I’m trying to make is that in the Bay Area, the combination of social activism and the Internet have given many people, including myself, a sense that the world can be changed. More voices than ever are being published, and finding audiences, and connections are being forged across great distances on topics of obscure specificity.

Here in ‘Silicon Alley‘ as it has been called, that missionary zeal isn’t as prevalent — New Yorkers are probably a bit more honest about the fact that they’re really just in it for the money, and companies generally trace their roots back to advertising and publishing instead of research institutions and the defense industry.

It was in New York when I made a career shift from a gopher at a small commercial production company to a web monkey — at film school I had started exploring online publishing as a way to get around traditional distribution means. In other words, I wasn’t looking forward to the vagaries of sycophancy and creative compromise necessary to get a book or movie released.

Hence, I moved to San Francisco at the turn of the century. And while within two years I ended up on the short end of the dot bomb, I kept the faith through some lean years. And thanks to blogging, I managed to go from animating banner ads in Flash and editing images and copy for the online arm of a local housewares retailer to eventually supporting myself as a writer.

Could I have done it if I stuck around New York? Maybe, but I’m happy I didn’t have to. Because it’s that (often seemingly unfounded) optimism in the power of a more democratic media that animates me, and that is much more prevalent in San Francisco, which has long lived under the shadow of New York publishing giants and the Los Angeles film industry. Besides, the weather’s a hell of a lot better. Now if there was a decent deli in San Francisco, with wifi, I’d never want to leave again.

Jackson West has been wasting time on the internet since he was sixteen. Nearly his entire waking life can be tracked online at jacksonwest.com. You can see his Bay Blogwalker column on the Culture Blog Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and his Future Fresser reports on Thursdays, all at 3 p.m. Want to add your Bay Area blog to his reading list, or to make a future Future Fresser recommendation? Send it his way.